Designing Business through Interactions

Recently, I've been coming back to the question of designing business. Who does it? How is it done? Do we design business through interactions?

A long time ago, what brought us the tools we now take for granted - the mighty mouse, the flat screens, the software and hardware - was the desire to design interactions with technology. Those stories are told in Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge.

The focus of design is the end user. The enjoyment that individuals - we - gain from using well-conceived products is the hallmark of good design. We design story, an experience, and then how that transfers and translates into our lives. The meaning we derive from it.

Digital technologies designed for interaction with simple interfaces - Twitter, IM, LinkedIn questions and answers, FriendFeed, email, text messaging, even Digg and StumbleUpon to a certain degree - allow us to shorten the distance between ideas and feedback. An outcome of that is in some cases a connection. Do interactions help shape business, too?

Maybe we can ask this one differently - why wouldn't they?

There was another book that was seminal in my thinking around Designing Business, written by Clement Mok. I had the pleasure of meeting Mok at a Fast Company Real Time event in Phoenix back in 2000. Funny how things we pick up along the way are like seeds that start growing us in new directions when properly nourished.

Many of the notions in Mok's book are starting to take hold today. Throw away the org chart and put in an information architecture - what do you see? What are the interdependencies? We all understand what identity design means. It is not the domain of logos and style guides in corporate environments alone anymore. We go back to the relevance of micro interactions to feed what that is and means from the outside in.

The word "interactivity" has become a computing buzz word, but it has a meaning that illuminates and ultimate goal: to create a totally immersive experience. I would add that it infers a correlation between things and carries the ultimate goal of human communication.

If interactions are designed to be transformative experiences, then the business where the interactions occur, will be transformed.

Comments

Jon:

I have often referred to what you describe in emerging companies survival of the fastest. I like the expression survival of the busiest as well, but you can see how if you're busy doing all the "wrong" (as in non productive or conducive to forward movement) things, it does not help.

You just gave me an idea for a future conversation about OD. Glad to meet you, virtually.

I have worked with OD consultants in the past. I do wonder if you are now incorporating the dynamics of engagement thanks to the new tools - faster feedback, people talking about your business, etc. - in you work.

I think that the OD field and its focus on engagement, non-manipulative motivation and learning offers many of the design principles for business architecture and the design of knowledge-based / knowledge-dependent work in an interconnected environment.

Everything currently being taught in business schools is all out of date. We're inventing the future now. Don't blink -- you'll miss an entire phase.

Paula is very tuned into, sensitive to and insightful about all this stuff.

I'd like to add an opinion ... I think there are two parallel planes, of sorts, here. While much is out of date and much is moving fast, a large part of the business arena is carrying on (structurally and dynamically) as if not much has changed while another part (small, emerging, the "revolution just begun") is reinventing the rules one hyperlink, image and chat after the other.